A South Korean navy ship fires a missile during a drill aimed to counter North Korea's intercontinental ballistic missile test on July 6, 2017. (Photo by South Korean Defense Ministry via Getty Images)

For the great strategic theorist Carl von Clausewitz, strategy is about the imaginative search for options to achieve objectives and a critical analysis of which one is best.

Sometimes there are no good options and one must select the least bad option.

Today’s newly destabilized world having resurrected the specter of nuclear war, it behooves us to plan for ways to prevent and defend against a ballistic missile attack. Technology is less a bar to such antiwar insurance than are the U.S. government’s illusions and assumptions. Rhetoric aside, U.S. strategic policy is still mired in a 1960s assumption—that the fear of nuclear destruction makes these weapons unusable—and in the illusion that this fear is shared universally.

Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy, by Barry R. Posen. Cornell University Press 2014

America In Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder, by Bret Stephens. Sentinel 2014

This generation’s U.S. foreign policy, resulting as it has in lost wars and almost universal disrespect for Americans, does not have many defenders.

Politicians and pundits of the Establishment Left, who made socioeconomic reform the hallmark of their foreign policy in the 1950s and 1960s, stopped advocating it in the 1980s—or any other means of supporting their remaining pretenses of global leadership. Whether they call themselves “internationalists” or “realists,” they are about reducing America’s power, and cover impotence with terms such as “multilateralism” and “leading from behind.”

Neoconservatives continue to support America’s primacy, as well as traditional geopolitical commitments including victory in the “war on terror.” They led the Bush administration into picking up “nation-building” as the Left was dropping it, became its last defenders, and were dragged into sharing the American people’s disdain for it. Now, neoconservatives are at a loss about how to square such means as they are willing to use with the grandiose ends they still advocate.

Images of Hamas’s artillery rockets being intercepted by Israel’s “Iron Dome” missile defense system naturally lead Americans to wonder why, if missiles were fired at our homes, we wouldn’t go to the trouble of stopping them in mid-flight as the Israelis do. The answer is that our bipartisan ruling class decided half a century ago that even trying to protect America against all but token missile attacks would be a hostile act toward Russia and China.

Obama is making sure that nothing will stand in the way of Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. Veiling that with a transparently insincere claim to be “freezing” Iran’s quest, and leaving in the lurch governments and peoples that had counted on his promises, he dishonors America. Thus does he guarantee that many more governments will acquire such weapons, and consigns to history the very ideal of nuclear non-proliferation.

But let us look on the bright side: There is value in leaving no doubt about reality.

Remarkable is the extent to which ruling class consensus can blot out common sense.

The headlines tell us that more and better US missile defense devices are being tested and deployed to keep pace with Iran’s and North Korea’s increasing capacity to deliver nuclear-armed ballistic missiles on ourselves and our allies. Secretary of Defense Hagel said that these improvements “make clear to the world that the United States stands firm against aggression.” The underlying reality however is that these devices, intentionally designed to be marginally adequate, are inadequate for their minimal purpose. Much less can they safeguard our lives and interests against serious threats from serious quarters: Russia, China, and whatever hostile forces might come into possession of Pakistan’s arsenal.

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